RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/brandeis-word-police-highlights-the-absurdity-of-modern-progressivism-opinion/ar-AALro1b

The Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center (PARC) website at Brandeis University reads like a parody.

PARC compiled a list of words it deemed too offensive to utter, which includes “rule of thumb,” “killing it,” “freshman” and, somewhat ironically, “trigger warning.” The list is making the rounds on social media, eliciting general mockery from the political Right. And these social justice warriors deserve to be mocked: Their list is ridiculous.

But conservatives, moderates and anyone interested in an open and honest exchange of ideas shouldn’t dismiss PARC as merely a joke. This level of word-policing is quite dangerous.

The “student-centered” resource plays into absolutely every stereotype you might have about hypersensitive, self-preening progressives who are offended by everything but claim to be brave enough to fight for the marginalized. They see the world through a social justice lens, focusing on the tenets of critical race theory and intersectionality.

PARC staffers compiled a list of examples of supposedly “violent language.” All examples are ridiculous; a few are even condemned based on outright erroneous claims.

Progressive activists believe words are violence (when they’re not claiming silence is violence). Everything they do not like is considered violence, including the “oppressive” phrase, “killing it.” Rather than adopt the understood meaning of the phrase, they argue it should be replaced because “if someone is doing well, there are other ways to say so without equating it to murder.”

The phrase “rule of thumb” apparently also can’t be used. PARC claims the expression “allegedly comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.” This is simply untrue.

PARC demands you stop using the word “picnic” because it claims the word was “often associated with lynchings of Black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics.” This also is simply not true, and PARC ended up deleting this entry.

The phrase “go off the reservation” apparently has a “harmful history rooted in the violent removal of indigenous people from their land.” So you better stop using it. And if you were expecting a trigger warning ahead of their word-policing, think again. “Trigger warning” will have “connections to guns for many people,” and it is thus banned. Similarly banned is “take a shot at” because it uses “imagery of hurting someone or something.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/25/canceling-critical-race-theory

Just four weeks ago, I wrote about the beginnings of a resistance to the teaching of Critical Race Theory, which is Marxist in nature, and asserts that the United States is systemically and irredeemably racist. Parents and other citizens started filing lawsuits and joining emergent activist groups. And now, many state governments have entered the fray. According to Education Week, as of June 18, 25 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict the teaching of the controversial theory. In fact, eight states have already enacted bans.

The activity varies from state to state. In Florida, the state board of education has voted to approve a rule that prohibits schools from teaching CRT and the 1619 Project. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds recently signed a law that will ban schools from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex, among other provisions. In D.C., a bill has been introduced that would ban the promotion of “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating.” And Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a law limiting the ways that teachers can discuss racism and sexism in class. As Education Week’s Mark Walsh explains, “The laws passed or proposed so far generally prohibit schools from teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior, that any individual is consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist because of their race or sex, and that anyone should feel discomfort or guilt because of their race or sex.”

And now, ironically, the wokesters—the same crowd that brought us “cancel culture”—is screaming “Censorship!” National Education Association president Becky Pringle said her union is contemplating the use of “legal action against laws restricting how racism and history are taught.” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten weighed in on Florida’s law, insisting that lesson plans from the debunked 1619 Project help students “discern fact from fiction,” and laughably accuses Florida governor Ron DeSantis of “pretending this history doesn’t exist.” And now, teachers in 22 cities are planning protests over laws “restricting racism lessons in schools.”

The born-again First Amendment zealots are dead wrong, however. The 1619 Project is a lie. The original document maintained, for example, that slavery was a primary motivation for the colonists’ revolt against England and the Pilgrim’s subsequent trek across the Atlantic to the New World in 1619. The bogus document also claims that 1619, not 1776, was the year of “our true founding.” After receiving criticism from historians, some tweaks were made, but the document is still a fraud. 

And banning the teaching of falsehoods should not get under the skin of any honest person. If the Flat Earth Society demanded that their ideas be taught in government-run schools and were shunned, would anyone be at the barricades with fists clenched? Of course not.

Regarding Critical Race Theory, it is, well, just a theory. And not all theories belong in schools. If I came up with a theory that women are dumber than men, and could produce no facts or scholarship to substantiate my claim, would educators be pushing for schools to teach it? Hardly. Additionally, the teaching of CRT actually runs afoul of the law. As legal experts Rick Esenberg and Daniel Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty point out, the Constitution, along with federal and state statutes, protects “freedom of conscience.” Hence, public schools “cannot force students to affirm certain points of view—such as critical race theory’s ideas of white supremacy, white privilege, or systemic racism. The Constitution also prohibits ‘compelled speech,’ meaning that teachers cannot force a student to speak a certain message, such as a confession that ‘I am a racist.’”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinstein

On May 23, 2017, not so long ago in real time but seemingly an eternity given the extraordinary history we’ve lived through since, a group of 50-odd students at Evergreen State College arrived at the classroom of a biology professor named Bret Weinstein, demanding his resignation. He stepped into the hall to talk, believing he could work things out.

He was wrong. Weinstein’s offense had been to come to work during an event called the “Days of Absence,” in which white students, staff, and faculty were asked to stay home. This was an inverted version of a longstanding Evergreen event of the same name that, based on a Douglas Turner Ward play, invited students of color to stay home voluntarily, to underscore their value to the community. As he would later explain in the Wall Street Journal, Weinstein thought this was a different and more negative message, and refused to comply. When that group of 50 students he’d never met arrived at his door and accused him of being a racist, he assumed he could find common ground, especially when his own students (including students of color) spoke on his behalf.

“I was one of Evergreen’s most popular professors,” he later testified to the House of Representatives. “I had Evergreen’s version of tenure. Did they really think they could force my resignation based on a meritless accusation? They did think that, and they were right.”

Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter who described his politics as unabashedly liberal, even leftist. Like many, he’d grown up steeped in the imagery of sixties protest culture, probably imagined himself on its side, and therefore thought he could find solidarity with protesters. He didn’t realize was that he was the canary in a coal mine for a new movement that understood free speech as a stalking horse for the exercise of institutional power. When Weinstein opened his mouth to defend himself, what the crowd heard was him attempting to exercise authority, and they exercised theirs back.

They’d won over Evergreen’s new president, George Bridges, who refused to intercede in Weinstein’s behalf and later even asked college police to stand down, when protesters began stopping traffic and searching cars for someone, presumably Weinstein. The police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety, and ultimately he was, in fact, forced to resign.

Frequently portrayed as the involuntary protagonist of the first of a series of campus free speech crises, in fact Weinstein was one of the first to understand that a rollback of “free speech” in cases like his was incidental to the larger aims of the movement.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” he told the House Oversight Committee.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/suppressing-and-punishing-speech-fight-racism-richard-l-cravatts/

Even before the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, universities had demonstrated that they were in thrall with an obsession about racism and racial equity. Diversocrats in bloated fiefdoms of equity, diversity, and inclusion diligently indoctrinated so-called marginalized students on how to be victims and oppressed, and whole systems were set up to monitor the behavior of potential racists and punish them for their transgressions.

At the University of San Diego’s Law School, for example, members of the Black Law Students Association, in order to confront “the oppression that is inextricably linked to [their] Blackness,” demanded that the law school “develop a classroom diversity officer position tasked with observing classroom practices and reporting questionable conduct within the classroom to the administration” so that perpetrators could be censured and punished.

At Princeton, several hundred faculty members published a letter to the administration in which they asked that the University form “a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty . .  ,” overlooking the fact that what they were calling for was a veritable star chamber in which a handful of virtue-signaling, race-obsessed faculty would use their own bias and subjectivity to vet the research and teaching of fellow faculty and decide which viewpoints would be permitted and which, henceforth, would not (and would potentially even be punished)—a blatant violation of both the spirit and intent of academic freedom.

That same desire to ferret out any racist thought or bias which might injure or make uncomfortable a member of an identity group has seeped into public schools, as well, along with the impulse to censure and punish any staff or students who violate the overly-broad strictures of conversations about race, culture, and politics.

In Chicago, for example, where out of nearly 1,500 shooting victims so far in 2021, over fifty were 15 or younger, at least school-aged children will not be threatened by racism and bias on the part of their school peers now that they can identity and report bigotry in their schools. The formal program, “Transforming Bias-Based Harm,” promotes some of the insidious aspects of now-typical diversity and inclusion campaigns, including finding racism where it is almost imperceptible: implicit or unconscious bias and microaggressions. Students will be able to report the misbehavior of fellow students, including “everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional,” directly through the Chicago Public Schools website, and perpetrators are potentially subject to being punished for their unacceptable speech. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/23/viral_school_board_speech_it_is_my_constitutional_right_to_critique_your_fascism.html

In this viral video, Simon Campbell, a former member of the Pennsbury, PA school board, rips his former colleagues for allegedly seeking to censor video of spicy public comments and criticism of the school district.

“I’ve got news for you, School Board President Benito Mussolini, your power does not supersede that of the U.S. constitution and the rights of the citizens of this great country,” he said before being warned not to name-call.

“I’m quoting you from the U.S. Supreme Court. The judges wrote: ‘This nation is founded on the profound national commitment to the principle that debate of public issues shall be uninhibited, robust, and wide open. And that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.’ That’s constitutional case law in this nation. I don’t have to be nice to you. Nobody behind me has to be nice to you.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/critical-race-theory-radical-education-americans-rep-lee-zeldin

For 18 years, I have been proudly serving as a soldier in the United States Army. Service has taught me two enduring lessons: 

First, our men and women who serve this country look at each other as brothers and sisters, with one common mission. Our politics, religion, race and ethnicity are of no consequence. All that is important to us is supporting each other, whether on the battlefield or at home. If that support means giving your life to save your brother, you selflessly do your duty. 

Second, all those deployed abroad since 9/11 in locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan have seen firsthand what happens when a nation is governed, not by the rule of law, but by the iron fist of authoritarianism. It gave us all a new appreciation of what we have in America – a nation of laws, freedom of expression and religion, the right to bear arms, equal opportunity for all, and due process. 

These two lessons are important foundational pieces of who we are as Americans. We judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, their religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And we jealously guard our fundamental rights so that we can continue to be the greatest nation on earth.

Unfortunately, those two principles are under attack in our schools. For years, we have seen the lurch to the left in our education system, but now that lurch has turned into an assault on our values, and it is being directed at our children within schools across the country in the form of critical race theory.

In short, critical race theory in education teaches children that America’s law, institutions, values, traditions and language are systemically racist and must be torn down. It requires that everything be viewed through the lens of race. It focuses on identity group politics and ignores that we are all unique individuals with different goals, skills and limitations. 

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

The competition for the greatest demonstration of “antiracist” wokism in our society is intense, what with media outlets, Hollywood, tech monopolies, teachers unions and plenty of others all vying to show the purest forms of virtue. But really, nobody can top the universities. These are the places where the ideas of “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory were hatched, and from which come the demands that all the rest of us get in line with the official “antiracist” orthodoxy.

Which is all you need to know to deduce that these institutions must themselves be the very worst and most overt practitioners of racism. In a post back in February titled “The Worst Racists Are The Left-Wing Academics” I quoted one elite university spokesperson after another falling all over themselves to confess their racism. (E.g., Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, September 2020: “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton. . . . Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”; the President and Trustees of Dartmouth, July 2020: “We know there are no easy solutions to eradicate the oppression and racism Black and other students, faculty, and staff of color experience on our campus. . . .”).

And then there is the NCAA. The NCAA isn’t some kind of difficult-to-analyze deeply-embedded “structural” thing that incidentally disadvantages blacks. Rather, it is a bold and overt anti-trust price-fixing conspiracy mainly directed to disadvantage black sports stars. Essentially all colleges and universities in the U.S. with sports programs of any significance belong to it and are active participants in the overt anti-black anti-trust conspiracy. In a post back in March 2018 titled “The Real Scandal In The NCAA,” I had this to say about the seemingly brilliant and virtuous academics’ total failure to recognize the real racism in their midst:

On the one hand, there is constant protest and anger [at major universities] over underrepresentation of blacks in the student body and faculty, even though almost all of the schools engage in dramatic discrimination in favor of blacks in student admissions and faculty recruitment. On the other hand, there is a naked antitrust conspiracy to prevent the black sports stars from getting paid anything for their work, and everybody is just fine with that.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/22/equity-or-education/

College admissions have been steeped in controversy for years with wrangling over which measures best identify desirable applicants. A typical application requires transcripts, essays, recommendations, and results from standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT. The latter are now at the forefront of current debate, including one taking place in California.

The University of California system began requiring applicants to take the SAT in 1960. Recently, there have been discussions regarding the use of test scores in scholarship or admissions decisions, from making submission optional (spurred by COVID-19 limitations) to ending the required submission. 

Increasingly, the motivation to change requirements no longer focuses solely on the student but is driven by concerns that family income, parents’ education, and race can adversely affect test scores.

UC Riverside Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox contributed to the debate with a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Dropping the SATs could make UC admissions more biased.” He included the findings of a faculty task force, which recognized that the UC system has been able to offset such bias by including other relevant factors in admissions. He argued that inequities could be made worse because test elimination would cause a greater reliance on grades, thus driving grade inflation, or result in more affluent families hiring tutors for their children.

While the task force’s findings and recommendations were persuasive, in May 2020 the UC Regents suspended the standardized test requirement for all California freshman applicants until fall 2024 and announced a plan to design a new test in time for 2025 admissions. If the deadline is not met, standardized testing requirements for all California students will be eliminated. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/critical_race_theory_teachers_school_boards_and_parents.html

This post wanders from the Midwest to a D.C. suburb, but the locations really have no geographic relevance because we’re witnessing the same thing playing out in public schools across America. It’s also got a lot of tweets, because they tell the story in real-time, with important videos. Stick with it, though because the bottom line is important: Parents are beginning to realize that the institutions that they fund and to which they’ve entrusted their children are indoctrinating their children with racist, Marxist theories. Moreover, when challenged, they will react like cornered rats and call upon the police state to protect themselves.

To begin with, you must see the Critical Race Training forced on Iowa School System teachers. The training is aggressively non-partisan in tone, as well as being racist and Marxist. (Hat tip: Twitchy.) After you’ve looked at these tweets (skimming them is fine), keep reading this post, because I’ll have more evidence of the battle between public schools and the public:
While many attendees doubtlessly sit in those CRT training sessions stoically listening as a way to keep their jobs, many teachers take this seriously. They believe it is their Gaia-given right to use their classroom to indoctrinate the students in their care.

The teacher in the video below, who is from Iowa (so ignore the language about Texas), is an example of people who take the training to heart helped, no doubt, by the endless indoctrination they experienced at college. They then use their authority in the classroom (and their control over students’ grades) to brainwash America’s children with material that violates laws against partisan education, racism, and, in Iowa, CRT indoctrination:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/school-board-meeting-cut-short-parent-arrested-after-fiery-speech-on-crt-transgender-policy/

Police declared an unlawful assembly at a Loudoun County, Va., School Board meeting Tuesday after residents clashed regarding the district’s proposed policies on transgender students.

The proposal in question, known as policy proposal 8040, would require teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. The board closed public comments at its meeting on Tuesday night after multiple interruptions by residents in the crowd.

After several speakers voiced support for the proposal, a woman who said she was the mother of a transgender student was booed after saying “hate” was “dripping from the followers of Jesus in this room.” The board called a five-minute recess and said public comments would be closed if any additional disturbance were made.

After other residents spoke both in favor and against the proposal, former state senator Dick Black criticized the board over its alleged backing of the policies as well as critical race theory. Residents cheered Black, prompting the board to close public comments by a vote of 9-0.

Parents began singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” after comments were closed.